The idea of the Toshiba is to confer on its owner an unbearable lightness of being. At only 1.2 kilograms, it weighs less than half that of the HP, which is, at 2.63 kilograms, scarcely unbearably heavy.

What was sacrificed to make the Portege so small? The most notable missing item is a built-in CD or DVD drive. This means you'll have to use an external or network drive to load software. You'll also need a little patience.

To keep weight and bulk to a minimum, the Toshiba uses a smaller, slower hard drive. Although it is has the same 60GB capacity as the HP, it spins at only 4200rpm, compared with the HP's tearaway 7200rpm.

The Toshiba's CPU and RAM are also slower but still fast enough for business applications such as word processing, email, web browsing and presentations. Although the CPU is decent enough, if you plan to play games, the Toshiba will not cut it. The two USB2 ports will handle most things. But the Toshiba has no FireWire or audio input ports or faster hard drive.

The Toshiba still has a full-sized keyboard (at least the keys are full size). There is also an SD card reader, IR, Ethernet, modem and external VGA. No modern notebook is complete without wireless, and the Toshiba has both 802.11g and Bluetooth 2. You'll find them on the HP as well - but you won't find the Toshiba's fingerprint scanner, which locks out unfamiliar fingers.

If you're prepared to compromise - especially with the 12.1-inch screen - the Portege is hard to resist.

At the other end of the scale, however, the HP is equally compelling. Because we've been conditioned to believe that you pay a lot more for lightness, we were surprised to discover that the HP costs $1475 more than the Toshiba's $3520 price tag.

Why? Well, there's the 15.4-inch screen, capable of displaying a resolution of 1920 x 1200 - higher than Apple's much-vaunted 17-inch PowerBook. Driving the display is a ATI Mobility FireGL V5000, and only the HP uses it. The HP's Pentium M 770 2.13Ghz CPU is almost 1Ghz faster than the R200's chip and it also uses faster RAM (533Mhz not 400Mhz).

The faster CPU is expensive. We found an online store (nintek.com.au) that sells the CPU separately, so we could compare prices. A Pentium M 770 is $924, the 760 2Ghz model is only $616, and if you go down to a 1.6Ghz 730 it's only $302.50. The R200's 1.2GHz Pentium M 753 doesn't even appear on the radar.

We guess the HP's built-in DVD writer should account for at least another $200. There is an extra USB2 port and FireWire, nine-pin RS232 and a S-Video port - but they're not too expensive. You have to look closely to understand what you're getting for the price. Most notebooks support only 802.11b and g wifi. The HP has a tri-band card that can also use 802.11a.

Then there's the hard drive. It probably cksts $100 more than you'd pay for the average notebook hard disk.

The HP is for the mostly deskbound, uncompromising professional. It's black and neat, and it's bound to improve your boardroom status. On the commute home, people will crane their necks to glimpse the DVD on that wide screen. They'll hardly notice us lighter beings.